


Good Eats

by Strange_Archivist



Series: Everything, Every Things [11]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-11 20:00:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12942660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strange_Archivist/pseuds/Strange_Archivist
Summary: Mr. Clarke always brings in the best brownies for the AV club. It's just a fact. They're better even than anything Mrs. Wheeler makes. Dustin embarks on a mission to find out how the brownies get so good.





	Good Eats

Mr. Clarke always brings in  _the best_ brownies for the AV club. It's just a fact. They're better even than anything Mrs. Wheeler makes.

One day, as they're packing up to go home after another club meeting, Dustin hangs back. It's not like he's got somewhere to be like Mike rushing off to the cabin to see El, or Max and Lucas, rushing off to the arcade for their "It's totally not a date, but it's just us" thing, or even Will, who got signed up for a special art class in the next town over.

With no girlfriend and no other talents to distract him, he figures he may as well grab another brownie for fuel while he reads up some more on amphibians. They _are_ pretty cool he's decided, even when you aren't trying to figure the origin of a previously unknown species. And after patching things up with the librarian, he'd been able to get a special book on amphibian studies done all over the world, brought in from one of the nearby college libraries.

"You flatter me, Mr. Henderson," Mr. Clarke says, catching him grabbing the second to last brownie.

"What, you make these?"

The teacher chuckles. "Who else?"

Dustin shrugs. "I dunno. I didn't know you could bake."

"Of course, baking is chemistry, you know."

"Chemistry?"

"Well, yes. Getting the proportions right to ensure the proper chemical reaction. You know the old baking soda and vinegar trick, yes?"

Dustin makes a face. "Please. I'm not an amateur."

His teacher laughs again. "Of course not. So similar reactions happening between the ingredients in baked goods is what makes them either light and fluffy or dense and chewy or any other number of things in between. That's simplifying it quite a bit, of course, but in essence a lot of cooking, especially baking, is chemistry."

"Huh. I never thought of it like that. Thanks, Mr. Clarke."

"You're welcome Mr. Henderson."

Dustin thinks about this on his way home and later while he's munching away on the brownie while reading. He thinks about it the next day, and the next, until finally he decides he's going to trust what he always trusts, books, and starts leafing through one of his mom's cookbooks.

The recipes are finicky. More involved than he ever thought. It's not just getting a bunch of ingredients together and mashing them into a bowl and then dumping them in a pan, you have to add certain things together at certain times, though none of the recipes ever really say why. This frustrates him.

His mom catches him at it one day and smiles, "going to whip up something for us, Dusty?"

"I dunno, maybe."

"What's got you interested in cooking anyway?"

"I dunno, just bored I guess. Do any recipes ever say why you have to do stuff the way you have to do it?"

"What do you mean, honey?"

He points to one of the cookie recipes he's been contemplating. "Like, this says you should cream the sugar and butter together separate from the dry ingredients, then add the eggs, then add the combined dry ingredients. But why?"

"Hmmm, I dunno, sweetie. I never thought to ask. Wanna try it a different way and see what happens?"

They start going through a lot of baking ingredients, but Dustin's mom doesn't seem to mind. Some of the creations Dustin makes are divine. Most are just ok, if a little weird. Some are terrible.

"I still don't really know why it turns out weird if you add baking powder instead of baking soda, though," Dustin always frowns. None of the cookbooks really explain what's happening with the chemical reactions, and that had been the whole point of his trying to learn how to bake. Well, ok, having lots of baked goods around all the time ain't half bad either.

"Time to do more research, I think," his mom says with a wink. "You need to find out what's in all the ingredients you're putting in and then maybe you'll understand better why they act the way they do."

Dustin claps a hand to his head. "Of course. I've been an idiot. Thanks mom." Then he's off to the library again, but this time, not to the cookbook section. This time he's getting more books on chemistry.

He takes them home and tears through them. Then he looks at the content descriptions on each ingredient. The chemical descriptions. Baking _soda_ is sodium bicarbonate. Baking  _powder_ is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium aluminum sulfate and monocalcium phosphate. _Now we're getting somewhere,_ he thinks.

Eventually, his combined research and experimentation means Dustin makes brownies almost as good as Mr. Clarke's. And cookies and cupcakes that are better than just about anyone's.

In high school, his baking skills are so renowned that he's roped into baking for the drama club bake sale, courtesy of Will who's joined them for set-design.

 

In college, his baking skills become a big selling point to clubs also doing bake sales, but also for just about any study group Dustin joins. And, okay, maybe he gets more requests for particular brownies with an extra special ingredient in them, but it's still baking (ha), it's still chemistry and Dustin still loves and excels at it.

None of his friends are surprised when, years later, Dustin becomes a huge fan of a certain celebrity chef who's entire cooking show is based on explaining the science behind how ingredients interact with each other and interact with human tastebuds.

They are, however, surprised, when they hear he eloped with a woman he met at said celebrity chef's book-signing. Until of course they meet Rosa, and they too fall in love with her and her funky little bakery dedicated to making treats shaped like dragons and superheroes and x-wings and just about anything else.

"You're a pair of real shitheads, you know that?" Steve tells them, when Dustin and Rosa together present Steve with a birthday cake they made for him into the shape of a demogorgon and hand him a "knife" fashioned to look like a tiny baseball bat with nails in it, to cut the cake with. But he's smiling and groans in obvious satisfaction once he tastes the triple-chocolate confection with raspberry sauce.

Scott Clarke, as Dustin's referred to him since the day he graduated high school, receives a tin of cookies from Dustin every year around the holidays, sometimes accompanied by a letter, sometimes not. The cookies are, of course, always excellent, but one year, they come accompanied with two letters. One letter is from Dustin, detailing his research, and mentioning at the end, "oh by the way, I got married! The brownie cookies are Rosa's creation. She even included the recipe for you." The second, is from the formerly mentioned Rosa, thanking him for instilling in Dustin a love of baking, "it is, after all, how we met" she writes, and, as Dustin promised, including the recipe for her formerly mentioned brownie cookies.

Scott follows the recipe to the letter, but they don't come out quite the same. He somehow doesn't mind.

**Author's Note:**

> The certain celebrity chef is, as some may have guessed, Alton Brown (if you didn't catch that from the gic title). I got the headcanon that Dustin would adore Good Eats while doing my own baking, and it just exploded into this. I'm not sorry :)
> 
> Comments are always appreciated!


End file.
